FIFA Opens Ethics Case Against German Soccer Officials Including Beckenbauer

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Among those being investigated by FIFA’s ethics committee are two former presidents of the German soccer federation, Wolfgang Niersbach, left, and Theo Zwanziger, right.CreditAlex Grimm/Bongarts, via Getty Images

By Andrew Das

March 22, 2016

FIFA announced Tuesday that its ethics committee had opened formal proceedings against six high-ranking German soccer officials who led their country’s successful bid to host the 2006 World Cup.

The announcement comes less than three weeks after a team of legal advisers hired by the German soccer association, known as the D.F.B., released a report on its investigation into a suspicious payment linked to Germany’s successful bid. The report said it found no indication that votes were bought, but it did not rule out the possibility of corruption because it could not establish who ultimately received the money.

One reason for that, the report said, was that investigators were unable to review all relevant documents or to question everyone involved. The German soccer legend Franz Beckenbauer, for example, who led the 2006 organizing committee, did not meet with the legal team, answering questions only through his lawyer.

The men now under investigation by FIFA’s ethics committee include two former presidents of the German soccer federation, Wolfgang Niersbach and Theo Zwanziger, and Mr. Beckenbauer. Mr. Niersbach is a member of FIFA’s ruling executive committee, and Mr. Zwanziger and Mr. Beckenbauer are former members of that body.

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Franz Beckenbauer, above, is one of four officials under investigation for “possible undue payments and contracts to gain an advantage” in the World Cup selection process, FIFA said on Tuesday.CreditChristof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Four of the officials, including Mr. Beckenbauer and Mr. Zwanziger, are under investigation for “possible undue payments and contracts to gain an advantage” in the World Cup selection process, FIFA said in a statement. The two others facing those accusations are Horst R. Schmidt, the former secretary general of the D.F.B. and the vice president of the 2006 organizing committee, and Stefan Hans, the former chief financial officer of those organizations.

Two other officials, Mr. Niersbach and the 2006 World Cup tournament director, Helmut Sandrock, are accused of violating several articles of FIFA’s ethics code related to disclosing and reporting potential ethical breaches.

FIFA said that after examining the report commissioned by the D.F.B. and carried out by a team from the multinational law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, it opened formal proceedings against the individuals “in the context of the 2006 FIFA World Cup host selection and its associated funding.”

When that report was released earlier month, Christian Duve, a partner with Freshfields, said questions also remained about Mr. Beckenbauer’s role.

The Freshfields team said it had combed through 128,000 electronic documents and more than 740 folders of files, and that it had questioned 31 people, including Mr. Beckenbauer and Mr. Zwanziger. Mr. Duve said that through those inquiries, the team had been able to partly reconstruct the path of the 2005 payment — for 10 million Swiss francs, or about $10.9 million in today’s dollars — through various accounts.

“This payment was declared as a payment for a FIFA gala,” Mr. Duve said at the time. “We have found it was not intended for that.”

Instead, the German federation paid the money to FIFA, which transferred it to Robert Louis-Dreyfus, the chief executive of Adidas at the time, through a FIFA account. From there, the payment took a winding path through Switzerland and Qatar, but the investigators could not trace it further.

The FIFA inquiry only adds to the problems of many of the officials involved in Germany’s World Cup bid. Mr. Beckenbauer, who won the World Cup as a player and as a coach, led the 2006 World Cup organizing committee, but he was fined and warned by FIFA’s ethics committee last month for his lack of cooperation in a separate investigation into the bidding for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.

Mr. Niersbach resigned as D.F.B. president in November, after German police raided the organization’s headquarters — as well as his home and those of Mr. Zwanziger and Mr. Schmidt — in what was reported to be a tax-evasion investigation. Mr. Sandrock resigned from the D.F.B. in February.

Last fall, the news weekly Der Spiegel first uncovered what it said was evidence that Mr. Beckenbauer had perhaps bought votes in his bid to secure the 2006 World Cup for Germany. The accusation and subsequent investigations have tarnished the Germans’ glow from the World Cup, a joyous football fest that cemented the new reputation of the country, and particularly of its capital, Berlin, as a place that was fun and unafraid to take pride in the nation and its achievements.

More recently, the bidding process for the 2006 tournament — as well as those for the events in 2010 (South Africa), 2018 (Russia) and 2022 (Qatar) — has drawn the attention of investigators from FIFA and various governmental bodies looking into broader questions of corruption in world soccer.

Alison Smale and Melissa Eddy contributed reporting from Berlin.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B12 of the New York edition with the headline: FIFA Opens Ethics Case Against German Officials. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe